I begin this evening with a text rather than a title, though I hope my presentation will be more in the nature of an address than a sermon. And I select this text because I believe it focuses very well and very sharply the sort of concerns which you are to address in your conference over this weekend—Practical Parish Problems: Gospel and Order. For how often have I heard this text trotted out in defence of the people getting on and doing what they want to do without reference to all those interfering lawyers who in any case cost a great deal of money! We are perfectly capable of ordering our own affairs thank you very much they say; why this dead hand of the law as it is perceived, which so often apparently stifles the inspiration and the initiative of the spirit?

In October 1993, I had to decide whether it was proper for me, as an unbeliever, to go to Parliament to vote in favour of a Church of England measure. Was it proper that laymen, not members of the church, not involved in the decisions taken, should be allowed to sit in Parliament to decide what the law of the church should be? After some discussion, I was persuaded it was proper, and cast my vote accordingly. In that decision, I recognized the triumph of one version of the Royal Supremacy over another. It is the triumph of Christopher St. German over Bishop Stephen Gardiner, of Sir Francis Knollys over Queen Elizabeth I, of Chief Justice Coke over Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and of John Pym over Archbishop Laud. That triumph took a century to arrive after Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, and, like many other triumphs, it threw out a promising baby with its mess of popish bath-water.

At the time of the sale of Doctors' Commons in 1865. there were twenty-seven surviving members of the Society of Doctors of Law, some of whom were retired from practice. Five of them (Adams. Deane, Harding, Phillimore and Twiss) had been given silk in 1858, after the loss of their monopoly of audience, and in the case of Dr Adams this set a precedent for granting that rank to a law graduate who was not a barrister. (The precedent was followed in the case of Dr Tristram in 1881.) The other Civilian silks had long before taken the precaution of being called to the common-law Bar—as had fourteen of the twenty-seven advocates mentioned above—and a few were benchers of their inns. Dr Spinks had been admitted and called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1858, but did not take silk until 1866. A partial assimilation had thus began, as a prelude to extinction.

‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’

‘The rigidity imposed on the BCP through being enforced by Act of Parliament is against the nature of worship and the practice of Church law. This rigidity contributed a good deal to the separation of Independents from the Church of England in the seventeenth century and of the Methodists in the eighteenth. Again, towards the end of the nineteenth century, when enforcement to a great extent broke down, a situation arose in which many of the directions of the Prayer Book were disregarded without permission or protest from authority.”

In his discussion of the nature of law St Thomas Aquinas cites St Augustine's principle that an unjust law ceases by that very fact to be a truly binding one, and this remark provides us with a useful springboard for a discussion of how different institutions have dealt with the occurrence of such a problem within their own systems. There are two principal factispecies envisaged when we deal with such a scenario within the Christian community; when a law has been interpreted erroneously by its officers and when the law is applied by the administration with a rigidity that exceeds the intention of the legislator. In these circumstances, it is arguable that we are dealing not with true law as such but with the corruption of law, non lex seil corruptio legis. The expression corruptio legis is here understood not in a subjective but in an objective sense, i.e. it is not to be understood to refer to the administration or the officials that apply the law but to the legal norm itself. The issues raised by the principle, non lex sed corruptio legis, are not simply ethical but also legal, and the important resolution in Augustine and Aquinas offers a useful window into one of the central problems of comparative administrative law.

A few months ago there was a national conference for all the archdeacons of the Church of England. We number just over a hundred and of these eighty were present. On the following weekend The Church Times had a cartoon on its front page showing two anxious clergy, one saying to the other, ‘What bothers me is what the other twenty-two were doing!’ Such is the reputation of archdeacons, who bear something of the character of that God whom the small boy once famously described as the Person who goes around seeing what you are up to and then telling you to stop.